Neal Stephenson - Reamde

He was now, for some reason, fully and utterly convinced of Olivia’s theory. Jones must have flown to North America. It was so doable.

And he must have stopped short for some reason, landed in Canada. It didn’t really matter why, exactly. But if he’d landed in the States, he’d have done something by now. The fact that he’d been silent for so long suggested that he had been maneuvering toward the Canadian border, looking for a discreet way to cross it.

How would he do it, exactly?

“What are you looking at?” asked a voice from behind him. Csongor, lying there awake, gazing dully at Seamus’s laptop.

“I’ve got a windmill of my own,” Seamus said.

“Jones?”

“Yeah. And I think he’s somewhere on this map.” He was looking at the bottom hundred miles of British Columbia, most of Washington State, and the Idaho panhandle. “And I’ll bet he’s got your Dulcinea with him. Sweet sovereign of your captive heart.”

“What are we waiting for?” Csongor asked.

“The embassy to open. And…”

“And what?”

Seamus grabbed his hair with both hands and pulled. “A fucking clue as to where exactly he wants to cross the border. Shit man, once you get past the suburbs of Vancouver it’s wilderness all the way to fucking Sault Ste. Marie.”

And that was when it came to him. Maybe because he was really smart. Maybe because he was lucky. Maybe because, down in the little toolbar at the bottom of his screen, a little tab labeled “T’Rain” was flashing on and off, trying to get his attention.

He clicked on that tab. The window expanded to reveal that Thorakks was under attack. He was out in the middle of a desert somewhere, walking along in a large crowd of characters who had all been following Egdod. That crowd was being assaulted by a horde of horse archers.

“Are you actually going to play video games now?” Csongor asked incredulously.

“Give me a minute to kick the shit out of these guys and then I’ll answer your question,” Seamus said, going into action, breaking Thorakks out of his robotic stupor, shouldering a shield, throwing up a protective spell. Cutting down one horse archer with a thunderbolt and another with a stroke of his sword.

But Thorakks wasn’t the target. Egdod was.

They were riding in to count coup on Egdod. They couldn’t hope to actually hurt a character of such power, of course. But they could earn the fantastic distinction of having struck a blow against the oldest and most powerful character in all T’Rain.

Egdod was doing nothing. Making no move to defend himself. He was still following his bothavior: trying to walk all the way to his HZ, thousands of miles away.

“Where are you?” Marlon asked. He had been awakened by the sounds of T’Rainian combat.

“How the fuck should I know?” Seamus responded. “When we left that place I stayed logged in and told Thorakks to follow Egdod. So we are wherever Egdod wandered to. How long since we left?”

“Something like twelve hours,” Csongor said.

“So. Richard Forthrast gets up twelve hours ago to answer the doorbell and never comes back. Never logs out properly. Egdod goes into his bothavior. What does that tell you?”

Csongor shrugged. “Nothing.”

“He’s sleeping,” Marlon suggested. “He was awake for a whole day.”

“Goddamn it,” Seamus said. “I was afraid one of you would come up with a reasonable explanation such as that.”

“You have an unreasonable explanation?” asked Yuxia, who had emerged from her private bedchamber looking sweet and sleepy and heard the last part of the exchange.

“Yeah,” said Seamus, after a brief pause to admire Yuxia. He minimized the T’Rain window, brought up his Google map again, and zoomed in on a stretch of border between the Idaho panhandle and a town called Elphinstone. “Abdallah Jones is crossing the border here, now. And Richard Forthrast is helping him do it.”

AS THEY DROVE down out of the pass and into more settled areas in the river valleys on the dry side of the Cascades, Olivia began to feel oppressed by the sense that they were absurdly conspicuous, driving along together in this rental car.

She did not have the faintest idea what the police and the FBI might be thinking. But it seemed best to assume the worst and to start behaving as though she and Sokolov were in a hostile country, cover blown, being hunted by the police. In which case, doing what they were doing was the dumbest possible way to proceed, and it was a miracle they hadn’t been pulled over and handcuffed yet.

They could ditch this car easily enough and find some other way to proceed eastward. But the mere fact of “short-haired Asian woman traveling with lean, close-cropped blond man” was enough to make them conspicuous, should an APB go out to all the local cops and highway patrol cruisers.

“We have to split up,” she said.

“Agreed.”

“At least for now,” she added, because some ridiculous instinct was telling her that her first sentence had sounded a little too harsh and she didn’t want to hurt Sokolov’s feelings. She glanced over at him. He did not appear to be hurt.

“The place we’re going is in the general vicinity of Bourne’s Ford, Idaho,” she said.

“Bourne’s Ford, Idaho,” he repeated.

“I can’t give you a specific landmark. I’ve never been there.”

They had become stuck in traffic behind a semitrailer truck that said WALMART.

“Just find the nearest Walmart,” she suggested. “There’s got to be one within thirty miles. I’ll meet you in the sporting goods department between noon and half past. I’ll just keep going there every day until you turn up.”

Sokolov pulled the long gun case out of the backseat and laid it across his lap. He opened it up to reveal the weapon. By popping out two pins he was able to break it down into two pieces, neither of which was more than about a foot and a half long, and by collapsing the stock he was able to make it shorter yet. He placed both pieces of it into his knapsack—a new purchase from the Eddie Bauer store in downtown Seattle—and then transferred a lot of other odds and ends that were rattling around loose in there: a few cartridges, two empty clips, some cleaning supplies.

“You really think you’re going to need that?”

“Is matter of responsibility,” Sokolov said. “Can’t leave in abandoned car. Anyway, is evidence too—fingerprints of Igor.” He zipped the pack shut and looked at her. “You get out at bus stop, I will liquidate car.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“In the forest, back up there, are, what do you call them, places where hikers pull off road, go to beginning of path.”

“Trailheads.”

“Yes. I think it is normal to park a car in such place for several days. It is legal. Will not draw attention. But it is off the road. Not obvious. I will go back, park at such place, hike down.”

“Then what?”

“Hitchhike.” Sokolov paused for a moment. “Is dangerous, I know, to take ride from strangers. With assault rifle in backpack, not so dangerous.”

They had been passing signs on the road that appeared to designate bus stops. After a few more miles they found one that was conveniently situated next to a parking lot where they could pull out of traffic. Olivia walked over to the bus stop and checked the schedule and verified that a bus would be along in another twenty minutes to take her into the nearby town of Wenatchee. She went round back of the SUV and rapped on the rear window. Sokolov had already moved laterally into the driver’s seat. He popped the tailgate. She hauled it open and pulled her bag out of the back. For a moment, their eyes locked in the rearview mirror.